British rocker Peter Gabriel has been calling for a greater focus on human rights for decades. Now he’s asking people to help him make that call using their BlackBerrys and camera phones.

Gabriel is in New York City to attend the 6th Annual Focus for Change Benefit Dinner and Concert at the Roseland Ballroom. The event is meant to highlight the work of Witness, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group co-founded by Gabriel. Witness aims to use video to bring attention to alleged human rights abuses. The gathering tonight will feature performances by Sheryl Crow and reggae star Jimmy Cliff; Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is among the special guests.

Gabriel says he decided to launch Witness after performing on Amnesty International benefit tours in the 1980s. During the tours, he met with people who had suffered human rights abuses and seeing their suffering first hand, instead of in the papers or on TV, spurred him to action.

“What astonished me is that people could suffer in this way and then have their experiences totally effectively denied, buried and forgotten,” Gabriel says. “It was double victimization.”

He began to push to get funding to launch a group that would use video to monitor such abuses. “Whenever there was video of this it was way harder for people who wanted to hide it to get away with it,” he says. After a bystander’s videotape of the Rodney King beating — unrelated to Gabriel’s efforts — made global news in 1991, he says, “People said ‘Oh, now we get it.”

Gabriel argues that the job of reporter is being increasingly taken over by ordinary people, and that traditional journalists must learn to practice “good curating” of the work of others. Because technology now allows almost anyone “to communicate with anyone else on the planet,” activists involved in human rights struggles should learn to employ the new web-based tools and fight Big Brother by being “Little Sister or Bigger Brother,” he says.

But can technological campaigns that aim to uncover government abuses cross the line? Gabriel says that the recent release of secret U.S. intelligence and diplomatic reports by WikiLeaks went “too far and will probably do damage.”

“I’m a passionate believer in freedom of the Internet and it may have been a bit of an own goal, in that campaign, because there’s now this very deliberate military crackdown on freedom of information,” Gabriel says. “I hope that once anger and embarrassment has died down over this particular incident that America remembers that it’s an inspiration to freedom for the rest of the world and it needs to be protecting that in the way that Obama said that he would.”

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